This Week in Fiction: Justin Torres

“Reverting to a Wild State” is told in an unconventional manner: it starts at the end and proceeds to the beginning. What made you want to tell it that way? Was it something you had tried before, in other stories?

No, I’ve written pieces that jump around in time, but never anything that moved directly backward. When this story opens, the narrator has achieved the boundless freedom he desired—he’s responsible to no one, and for a moment, he’s happy. But at what cost? The story could have proceeded chronologically, and shown the narrator growing remorseful and nostalgic—but it occurred to me that if the action of the story itself moved backward, all the harm he’s inflicted and the love he’s sacrificed would really come alive. I thought this was going to be a rather sad story, but as I neared the end I felt as if I were slowly restoring something precious the narrator had made a mess of, which was an unexpected pleasure.

The story is told in discrete scenes, sort of like snapshots in time. Did you have a fleshed-out idea of what these two men’s lives were like beyond these moments? Like, can you picture them before they met?

Everything I write has autobiographical elements. Even minor characters like Freddy, the doorman, or the farmer at the end of the story, began as composites of men I have known. A lot of writers, even writers I respect and admire, look down at this, or at least my admitting it. They ask, why write fiction if you want to write about yourself? But something magical happens as you filter personal experience through imagination and language: the composites become characters, and the scraps of lived experience morph, and what you end up with is wholly transformed. Frida Kahlo referred to herself as the great concealer—you could say she wasn’t painting herself, she was painting a series of masks.

This is a long answer to a short question; yes, I thought I knew everything about the two main characters when I started writing this story, but they turned out to be very different than the men I had in mind.

The first scene in the story (which is the last, chronologically) takes place in a sterile Manhattan high-rise. The last scene (which is actually the first) is in a wild, lush, prelapsarian setting. How explicitly were you trying to mirror in setting what the characters’ moral arc seemed to be? And did you worry about going too far?

It’s funny because I was considering it from the opposite direction—how explicitly do we align our interior lives with the setting around us? I watched a documentary about the naturalist John Muir last night and he was quoted as saying, “Civilization chokes the soul of man.” I’m not sure I agree with that, but I do think that it is easier to conceive of oneself as uncorrupted and good in an Edenic setting. Maybe the soul does breathe a little easier. I think place had a lot to do with these boys being able to come together, and I think place had a lot to with their unraveling, years later.

Many of your stories are quite short, by contemporary standards. Your first novel, “We the Animals” comes out in a little over a month. How jarring was it to write long?

Well, the novel itself is also quite short, by contemporary standards, and it’s comprised of a series of very short chapters. Each chapter, to use your phrasing, is a “snapshot in time” in the life of one family. So I wouldn’t really say I wrote long. I write incredibly slowly, and I am always drawn to concentrated, compressed, emblematic moments. I haven’t yet felt compelled to do otherwise, perhaps one day I will. Right now, I enjoy paring down; I enjoy restraint.

What are the favorite things you’ve been reading and listening to this summer?

I’m spending a month in a very remote area of Alaska. The day after I arrived, I fell on my face, out on the glacier. I spent the last week in bed, recuperating, and I read three books: Louise Erdich’s “Shadow Tag,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisted,” and Nella Larsen’s “Passing” (I’m on a kick about authenticity, representation, and autobiographical elements in art and fiction). Maybe it was the minor concussion, or maybe my favorite book is always the latest I’ve read, but each of these books just blew me away.

As for music, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to a band called My Gay Banjo; in the country, the banjo and the acoustic duet thing just feel right.